


(sleep wake hope and then)

by samalander



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Art School, Depressing, Depression, Fish out of Water, Gen, Man Out of Time, adjustment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-25
Updated: 2012-05-25
Packaged: 2017-11-05 23:37:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers wants to go back to art school. But more than that, he wants to figure out what his legacy is, and what he's doing here. (It can be read a pre-slash Steve/Tony, but that might be a bit of a stretch.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	(sleep wake hope and then)

**Author's Note:**

> I could not have written this fic without the brilliant help of my own Dr. C, theoreticalpixy, who knows more about art than I ever have. Any errors within are mine and not hers.  
> And also the inspired enabling of echoinautumn, who agreed that Steve should go back to art school, and that a propaganda class was just cruel enough to work.
> 
> Title from "anyone lived in a pretty how town" by ee cummings

_someones married their everyones_  
 _laughed their cryings and did their dance_  
 _(sleep wake hope and then)they  
_ _said their nevers they slept their dream_

* * *

It was Clint's idea.

They had been drinking, the six of them, in the kitchen of the tower after returning from Siberia, where they had put Dr. Doom's plan on ice. (And no one even made fun of Steve when he said that, which was a bit of a coup.)

Steve had watched them all; the way Thor studied Tony mixing the drinks, and the easy, if new, banter between Natasha, Clint and Bruce that spoke to the control each of them held in their psyche. 

(And wouldn't Stark laugh, to hear Steve say a word like psyche? Steve liked that Tony thought he was stupid, he liked being underestimated by his team, the same team that relied on him to call formations and lead, but never expected him to have read a book.)

Steve hadn't even realized he was drawing as he sat, hadn't thought about how he was doodling on a cocktail napkin until Barton looked over.

"You draw?"

Steve looked down at his napkin, at the pen he had produced from somewhere or other. It was a drawing of them all, the way he held his team members in his heart, the fierceness and the fragility. Or so he thought. He crumpled the napkin.

"A little," he shrugged. "I had a year of school before I enlisted. Trying to be Norman Rockwell."

Clint smiled sadly, and Steve was on the verge of asking him what he had wanted to be when he grew up (though, kids these days, he was always afraid the answer would be "Captain America") when Natasha piped up from across the table.

"You ever think of going back?"

Steve shrugged. He had thought of it. "When I was there, it cost $200 a year and I was barely able to make it. Now they want seventy-two times that." He sighed a little. "I miss the gold standard."

Tony rolled his eyes from behind the bar. "What, did you have to walk uphill both ways those days, too? Or did they have a horse-drawn subway?"

Steve, because he was a decent human being, and tried not to needle his teammates, did not respond "Go ask your father." Rather, he smiled. "We didn't even have horses in Brooklyn. Why do you think I got in so many fights? I was trying to get some punk to give me a smack into midtown."

Steve laughed gently, pretending not to notice the uncomfortable looks on his teammates' faces. Apparently they weren't quite ready for the Hero to End All Heroes to joke about his being a weakling. Fine, he thought, let them underestimate him again. He was a person under the mask, no matter what stories their parents - well, not Natasha's parents, or Thor's but the others - had told them.

Clint shook his head, trying to pretend that the conversation hadn't veered into Wierdsville there for a moment. "Wait, SHIELD pays you, right?"

"Of course. I just - do you know how much a gallon of milk is now?"

Tony shrugged. "No."

"You don't even use paper money," Steve scoffed. "Just - plastic."

"But you could go on the GI Bill," Natasha offered. "I mean, you were on active duty for more than ninety days, right?"

"What's the GI BIll?"

"It means you can do training for free. I think - you weren't ever discharged, were you?"

"No, I was listed as missing."

Clint smiled and laid one of his surprisingly gentle, if calloused, hands on Steve's shoulder. "We'll go to the VA when we have a minute. They'll explain it."

Steve nodded. He felt like this more often than not, more like this world had a set of rules almost exactly, but not entirely, opposite from his own. But Barton had been a soldier, too, and Steve trusted him to be honorable. 

About this, anyway.

* * *

Which was how, a week later, after returning from a fight with the Skrulls in Johannesburg, Steve found himself sitting across a table from a man who looked like he would rather be on the front lines.

"Son," the man said, not ungently, and it was galling to Steve that he was being treated like an infant. "Your grandfather trying to transfer these?"

Steve sighed. It had taken three hours to get to see the first counselor, and another two hours talking with a ridiculous number of people to get to this no-neck. "No, these are mine," he said for the fifteenth time.

"You were not on active duty from ‘42 to ‘44."

Steve threw up his hands in frustration. He couldn't very well tell anyone off the street that he was Captain America - he might have fought without his hood once or twice, but he was still a classified experiment and that _meant_ something to him.

And so he left the VA, Clint trailing behind and asking questions Steve didn't feel like answering, and decided to walk the 16 blocks back to the tower.

Clint gave up around block three; he declared that if Steve wanted to _wallow_ , he could do it on his own, and ducked into a subway station.

Steve wasn't wallowing, though, he was disappointed. He knew the world had moved on. He knew he was likely to see 2043 dawn as spry and fit as he had been for 1943. But there was a great sorrow in him, a kind of loss that he couldn't place, and the nonsense of that idiot at the VA had been the final straw.

Steve hadn't belonged in his own time - he was too little to help anyone - until someone made him better. And then things were going well. He had friends, a troop, and a date, and a plane to crash into the ice. He thought he might die, and that was okay, because he was dying for something. To save things.

If he'd known then that he would wake up seventy years later, he was pretty sure he would have found a way to make sure he never made it back.

He'd still have saved people, he just would have actually died a hero, and wouldn't have to live in a world where there was no Bucky, where Peggy was in a _home_ and Steve was too afraid to talk to the 95-year-old woman who he had loved when he hadn't even had the audacity to age. Where men half his age called him son, and told him his benefits weren't any good. He slept seventy years under the ice, seventy years that he could have spent preventing this world from spiraling into itself, and instead he woke up to a nightmare, and he could never go back.

That was some high-quality self pity, Steve thought, and smiled to himself. Erskine had said the serum just made him more of what he already was, and if he had been inclined to bouts of melancholy before, he supposed he was entitled to depressive episodes now.

Steve was trying to figure out how to beat the blues - the cinema wasn't the same, all three-dimensional glasses and no newsreel, so that wouldn't work, and they'd torn down the Thunderbolt on Coney Island twelve years ago, so that was out - when his phone rang, the little phone that Stark had given him, and Steve fumbled through the pockets of his jacket before holding the thing to his face, hoping he had hit the right button this time.

"Hello, this is Steven Rogers."

There was a long silence on the other side of the phone, but there was breathing in it. "Hello, this is Captain Rogers?"

"Hi, Steven, is your mommy home?"

"What do you want, Tony?"

"I want to talk to your mommy, little man, is she there?"

"You have three seconds before I throw this phone down a grate."

"You could just hang up on me."

Steve elected not to mention that he had only a vague idea how to do that, and simply began counting. "One, Tony."

His friend's laughter sputtered across the line, reminding Steve of staticky record players, before surrendering. "Okay, fine. Come back to the tower. Clint told us what happened and I've got Rhodey talking to VA for you."

Steve chose not to ask what a Rhodey was, or mention that the VA was quite possibly the third ring of hell and Clint was a traitor. "Alright," he said, and slipped the phone into his pocket without saying anything more. Or hanging up. But he figured Tony wouldn't notice.

* * *

Rhodey, it turned out, was actually Lt. Colonel James Rhodes of the Air Force and a close personal friend of Tony Stark. 

Then again, as near as Steve could tell, everyone was a close personal friend of Tony Stark when Tony Stark wanted something.

Still, Rhodes was genial and had a kind face, the kind you don't usually see on active-duty personnel, and when Tony introduced them, Rhodey actually did a double take before snapping to attention.

"It's an honor and a privilege, Captain Rogers. Sir."

Steve felt the blood rushing to his cheeks, but army men didn't salute indoors, so he had to content himself with looking embarrassed. Everything in his training told him that this man outranked him and had no business calling him sir or standing at attention for him, but this kind of thing happened more and more when he met service people who knew who he was, when he was in costume. They wanted to thank him, let him know he was still fighting with them.

Rhodey, though, after a moment of awkwardness, gave a lopsided grin that clearly spoke to his relationship with Stark. "So, 70 years at captain. You army boys really don't get promotions, do you?"

Steve laughed, and offered his hand to shake. "Pleasure to meet you, Lt. Colonel."

"His name is Rhodey," Tony offered, in his inimitable Tony fashion. "And he's going to get you into art school."

* * *

School was a good idea and all, and Steve appreciated that these things didn't happen overnight, but he found himself getting restless, sketching more and more to build up his calouses, his muscles, his portfolio. If he wasn't careful, didn't put the drawings in a drawer or the trash, Tony and Clint would hang sketches they found on the fridge, with his name scrawled across the bottom, "STEVEN ROGERS, AGE 92." Sometimes they drew the Es backwards, just to be dicks.

When they were being insufferable, which was most of the time, Steve would take refuge in the gym, where he beat the crap out of bags, dummies, Thor, and Natasha, in turns, and in Bruce's labs, where he very diligently touched nothing.

(Well, sometimes Bruce let him touch things, would take out things that had been invented in the last 70 years like digital cameras and ball point pens and let Steve take them apart or break them and not make any snide remarks about his stupid, childish questions, but mostly Bruce worked and Steve read or sketched and Tony and Clint left him alone.)

The hard part for Steve, really, wasn't that he had gained this weird family, the two evil stepbrothers in Clint and Tony, a sister in Natasha, a dad in Bruce, and some mix between a kitten, a puppy, and a machine gun in Thor. (It was a very 21st century family.) What was hard was watching the little kids, when he was out on the street as a civilian, playing Avengers. Playing Captain America, like war was a game.

Steve didn't remember ever being that carefree, that unaware of war. He had been born two years after the Great War ended, his father had fought in that one, and had died when Steve was three. He'd been nine when the market tanked - too young to really get it, but old enough to see the Hoovervilles and, as much as his mother had tried to pretend, he saw the look in the other people's eyes at the soup kitchens, and he knew it was a shameful place to be. He had been 16 when his mom died and 20 when he'd enlisted, not even old enough to vote. Steve was pretty sure he'd never had a childhood like these kids, even when he and Bucky were starting fights and causing trouble.

He'd started walking around in his old neighborhood on days when he wasn't saving the world, wishing for all the tea in China to be able to pick up a stick and play a little ball in the street, but kids didn't do that anymore, there were too many cars.

P.S. 3 hadn't changed much - it was still a dump, but the kids running around the playground were more modern, somehow, in their superhero t-shirts and tennis shoes. Steve stopped to watch them as they played, waiting for their parents to pick them up, he guessed.

The kid who saw him, really looked at him, was a little black girl sitting on a bench. She was maybe 10 years old, was missing about 6 teeth in her mouth and wore a dark puff of curly hair on her head. Steve was still unused to non-segregated schools, but he was equally unused to his cell phone. Some change was natural and good.

The little girl elbowed her companion, a boy with thick glasses whose lighter skin betrayed an ethnicity Steve couldn't begin to guess at, and they peered at him curiously. He smiled. Probably this was something dangerous for them; Natasha had told him how kids these days were supposed to be afraid of strange adults, but these two whispered for a moment before they got up cautiously, approaching him.

"Hey mister," the girl said, striking a pose, hands on her hips, that Steve could only call bossy. "You're not s'posted to be here."

Steve's heart felt lighter as he smiled at them. "I'm just passing by. I went here a long time ago."

"Not that long," the girl said, appraising him critically. The boy kicked at an invisible rock, caught in a fit of Shy.

"A fair few years," Steve assured them. "I'm Steve. What's your name?"

"I'm Rachel," she said, and elbowed the boy who, Steve thought, looking at him up close, was probably her little brother.

The boy looked at him, their eyes meeting, and Steve knew what he was going to say before the boy said it. "I'm Captain America," he said, in a small voice.

"He's Julius," Rachel corrected. "He likes to play pretend."

"You like Captain America?" Steve asked, and the boy nodded.

"Why do you like him, Julius? And not Iron Man?"

Julius was still shy, and Steve guessed that he was intimidated by the strange man, but Rachel wasn't. She spoke for her brother.

"Our dad's in ‘Ganistan," she said, gravely. "And he said that Captain America was a soldier, too."

"So you think your dad is like Captain America?"

Rachel shrugged, but Julius nodded slightly.

"And you wanna be like your dad?"

Julius nodded again. Rachel, clearly bored with the conversation that wasn't about her or anything she liked, rolled her eyes. "Captain America is stupid," she said. "I like Black Widow better."

Steve smiled. "You know, I like her too."

They would have said more, he was sure, but a woman's voice called across the playground - their ride, he assumed, their mom or aunt or nanny. He stood to leave, but Julius called him back. 

"Wait, mister!"

Steve crouched back down. "Yeah?"

"You look like Captain America. Are you him?"

"Nah, buddy," Steve said with a smile, wishing he could ruffle his hair. "I'm just a guy. You two be good."

Rachel pulled her brother across the playground, and Steve watched them go, the little boy's Captain America backpack thumping against the back of his knees as he walked.

* * *

It took a the entire spring for Steve to build a new portfolio from scratch, because none of his old drawings had survived, but it turned out that, despite being Stark's friend, Rhodey was amazing at both his job and the general business of being a human being, and before Steve really knew it, Rhodey had arranged for him to attend classes that fall under an alias - Roger Stephens, thank you, Air Force creativity. And Roger Stephens, a mature student just out of the Army, was cleared to take a full load, which Steve assumed meant he would be doing a lot of running into rooms, fastening his shirt and making excuses, the kind of things they did in comic books when heroes needed to preserve their secret identities.

The registration for school wasn't the way Steve remembered it; there were no lines and tables and fighting. It was all on computers, and to be totally honest that was confusing as fuck. It was bad enough that he felt like a freaking giant, like a strange, ancient titan in a sea of weird haircuts and men in shorts, but something about the future seemed to have stripped all the humanity out of the college registration process.

Most of the team was supportive - Bruce even helped him pick out something called a tablet for computer drawings - but Tony thought it was hilarious that Steve was going back to school, and Steve didn't point out that Tony had graduated college at 17, and some of them had wars to fight, and really long naps to take, that precluded higher education. So on orientation day, Steve accepted the brown paper sack Tony offered which, he was promised, was an "authentic" 1939 lunch. (And, when opened at lunchtime, contained 5 twinkies, a can of SPAM and a box of some kind of juice called "Hawaiian Punch", all of which would have caused Steve's mom to cross herself and spit, but he appreciated the effort, and wasn't about to waste the food, even if he did give three of the twinkies away to fellow students.)

He was taking twelve credits, because he wanted to get into the swing of things, and Rhodey had managed to scrape some transfers up, so he didn't have to retake Survey of the Great Masters (now called Art History I, thank you very much, 21st century) and since Art History II was only offered every other semester, Steve found himself with an opening in his schedule.

("Take bowling," Natasha had offered, because she was a secret junkie of bad TV and movies where characters were in college for 14 years and took classes like Underwater Basket Weaving and no matter how many times Steve tried to tell her that this was a _conservatory_ she still insisted that he could take Air Conditioning Repair I. Clint offered the idea of Advanced Finger Painting, and Steve hadn't bothered to dignify that with a response. Tony and Bruce presented him with a program they had written together called BannerGraphics, which they claimed would be better than Photoshop, but Steve didn't know what Photoshop was, so he just thanked them and moved on. He was sure Thor would have summoned some kind of Mighty Campus Steed for Steve to navigate to his classes with, but he was in Asgard, and Steve pretended not to be glad.)

So with spaces and time dwindling, Steve signed up for Dr. Cornelius's American Propaganda, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:30, and let Natasha take him to shop for supplies, trying not to faint at the idea of spending ten dollars or more on a pad of paper, and resolving to learn how to make his own, if it was going to be that expensive.

* * *

Steve had arranged his classes to be in the morning, because something about the villains they faced made battles most likely at nights, according to Bruce's statistics, or in the evening, magnificently silhouetted against the setting sun.

His first day went without any kind of major event - Monday was just Sculpture at 9, and after receiving the syllabus and some kind of idiotic trust-building activity in which they had to sit in a circle and talk about their artistic aspirations in order to learn to be more emotionally and creative honest, they were sent home to choose subjects.

Is was, as Tony might say, complete horseshit, but Roger Stephens was an illustration major who got most of his inspiration from the early part of the 20th century, and wasn't sure what he would do for money after school, but he was sure he'd figure it out.

It hadn't exactly seemed prudent to announce he was on the payroll of the world's largest espionage and military law enforcement agency. In fact, that had seemed a rather terrible idea. But Steve rather liked Roger, for all his affected 1990s cynicism. (Natasha had helped him with that, it mostly involved looking bored around the mouth and rolling your eyes. She claimed that the Russians invented it, but she said that about a lot of things.)

He almost missed his first day of Propaganda because of Dr. Doom's stupid timing and the demise of another Quinjet, but he made it, just barely sliding into a seat in the back of the steep lecture hall a moment before the professor began talking.

He missed what she said, though, because he was staring at a picture of himself on the room screen. Him, in his costume from 1940, saluting the viewer for buying war bonds. He remembered taking that picture, trying to smile the way they wanted him to, trying to look like he was enjoying himself, like he was approachable.

Professor Cornelius was talking, her TAs marching up the aisles to distribute syllabi, and Steve was trying not to let his jaw fall off in wonder.

"Who knows who this is?" the professor asked, flicking a red light across Steve's projected face. He slumped in his seat.

Some eager young woman in the front row raised her hand with the force of a sonic boom.

"Captain America," she said, looking pleased with herself even from the back, and Steve wasn't sure why that would be a triumph, seeing as he was sure he had been on TV this morning, saving Kiev from Doombots.

The professor nodded. "Our good Captain, savior of this very city. How many of you know that the first Captain America, the one who made the name, was a tool of the government in the second world war?"

Steve tried to melt into his chair. He wasn't a _tool_ , he was galvanizing the public.

Okay, he was a little bit of a tool.

A few hands went up around the room, and the professor went on. "Obviously, this Cap is not the same Cap we see today, he'd be a hundred years old now. But this image is a great starting place."

Steve tried to pay attention to the talk on propaganda, the definition of it and the words like "more myth than man really" and "play on our sympathies and inspire." But more than anything, he felt like he was drowning, like he was sinking into the reality of his situation.

It wasn't that Steve didn't know what he was, it wasn't that he hadn't counted on being a subject, on being an object. He had thought he was a person and maybe sometimes an inspiration. And sitting in on a lecture about himself, he had a sinking feeling that he had been people's thesis topics more than he had been their rallying point.

It would be a lie to say Steve stared into nothing for the rest of the class, but he certainly didn't feel like he was there as Professor Cornelius lectured about his work in the thirties and forties, flipping from image to image, talking about Steve like he wasn't even there - which, to be fair, he technically wasn't.

The last image in the slideshow wasn't him, and he knew it at a glance, because he would have remembered taking it. The image was a man in khaki fatigues, his back to the camera and saluting the flag, a replica of Steve's original shield (or maybe the real one, who knew, he never found out what happened to that thing) strapped to his back. The words were simple, "Our boys have got your back, Cap!" on the top, and a familiar reminder at the bottom; "Buy War Bonds Today!"

Professor Cornelius stared at it for a moment. "This is my favorite of the Cap propaganda, for the record. It's just, isn't it beautiful? It came out in early 1944, during the fourth War Loan Drive, which was targeted at women and farmers - this is the last Cap piece the government produced. We see him only from the back, still obviously Captain America due to the shield. But now he's dressed in a more combat ready uniform. The shield has marks on it, it's seen fighting. He's still saluting, but this time to the flag itself. Not any leader or politician, just the flag against a clear blue sky. The essence of America itself. He's walking toward it, he's making progress where in the others favored static poses. It subtly implies hope and progress. That even though this war is still dragging on and things are so tight Captain America is still moving forward. Our hero is still fighting. The war effort is still moving forward. Note also that the text is entirely red white and blue here. Everything in propaganda is done with purpose, these are not random choices. It has to be, to be effective. Everything about this image reads America. An America that is persevering and can still win. They didn't know that for sure at the time. The artist surely didn't know. The artist maybe didn't even believe in what he put on this poster. But it was considered necessary. That is the crux of propaganda, someone or some group trying to sway or manipulate the populace. It's advertising at it's finest, meant to hit you deep. Home, country, soldiers, America and the American dream, heroes. Concepts and ideas that we all want to be true. That we've been raised to believe in."

Steve was both mortified and flattered that they'd continued to use Captain America after he went down. He listened vaguely to the rest of the class, jotting down notes about Rosie the Riveter and Uncle Sam and Superman, all of whom, to Steve's credit, he remembered very well.

Steve decided, however, he needed to hear more about Captain America. He needed to know what it actually meant to be propaganda.

* * *

He showed up at Professor Cornelius' office hours two days later, a list of questions scribbled in his notebook.

Up close, out of the hall, Professor Cornelius was a little woman with a round face and flat, straight dishwater-brown hair, and Steve thought he could get to like her. Maybe. If he was even in a position to have opinions not sanctioned by the Department of Defense.

When he peered into her office, her back was to the door, and she was pouring over something on the computer, so Steve knocked gently before entering. "Ma'am?"

She turned, peering over the top of her thick-framed glasses. "Yes?"

"I'm sorry, I'm St- Stevens. Roger Stevens? I'm in American Propaganda?"

Steve felt, suddenly, like a work of art in this woman's gaze, like something that could be taken apart and judged, like something that was part of a 1930s style of humanity, broken down to brush strokes and line weight. She stared for a moment, and Steve wondered that her hesitation was, but the moment passed and she gestured to a chair facing her desk.

"Come in, Roger. What can I help you with?"

"Well, um, Dr. Cornelius-"

"No, Roger, I'm not a doctor and we don't do that here. I'm Amy. You're Roger. We're co-conspirators in causal learning."

Steve smiled. "Alright, ma'am. Amy. Ma'am. I just-" he took a deep breath. She was too casual, there was no hierarchy, and Steve felt more than a little adrift in the proceedings. "I wanted to ask you about Captain America."

Her head jerked toward her computer quickly, and Steve glanced at what was on the screen. It was a news site, with a writeup of their latest fight with Doom. The pictures on which, thankfully, seemed to focus on Natasha, and not him.

"A big fan of the Avengers?" she asked.

"No, it's not - the man in the 40s. Who was on the USO tours and whatnot. Do you know who he was?"

"No," she shook her head. "There are a lot of theories about Howard Stark - you know, Iron Man's dad? - but most of the scholarship assumes he was just a soldier in a costume."

"Oh," Steve said, feeling inexplicably sad, even though he knew the truth. "So why did they stop using him?"

"Oh, lots of reasons, Roger. The public gets tired of a character after a while, and if you've put a real person in a suit and sent him over to a war zone-"

"You think he died?"

"Captain America disappeared at the height of his popularity. They stopped using him long before they needed to. I don't know if he died or was captured or discharged injured, but I know he gave a lot to the country."

"Do you think it matters who was under the mask?"

"Well, yes and no," she ran a hand through her short hair, leaving static peaks in the wake. "It clearly mattered to someone, if they retired him. But to the general public, he was an idea. A pure, perfect thing. Can I ask, though, why you want to know?"

Steve felt a weight in his stomach. "I- I don't know-" he stuttered, and Amy smiled at him.

"Yes you do, come on."

"Ma'am, I really don't-"

"Then you shouldn't have taken the hood off when you were fighting in midtown."

Steve was pretty sure that, had Bucky been there, he would have reached over and pushed Steve's jaw closed, because it was hanging open.

"Come now," Amy smiled. "I study Captain America. You think I won't recognize him when he walked into my office? I teach a whole class on Captain America and the Modern Myth in the spring semester." She paused. "You should guest lecture."

"I'm not much of a public speaker, ma'am."

"Not much of a private speaker, either," she said, and Steve couldn't help but laugh. He liked this woman, god help him, in a way he hadn't felt before. He wasn't attracted to her or afraid of her. He felt some kind of weird kinship, almost, like they had a secret language.

"So, why do you ask about the 1940s Cap? Was he your dad?"

Steve shook his head. "Something like that. You could say I took up the family mantle."

"And if I ask what your real name is, Mr. Stevens?"

"I will have to tell you, by order of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, that it's Roger Stevens."

"Well," she looked disappointed for a moment, but she resolved her face into something more like neutrality. "I guess the only thing I can tell you is that he changed the world, whoever he was. Before Cap, we didn't have a real face of the troops. We had Uncle Sam for all of us, but Cap humanized our forces, made them something we all related to. Does it matter who he was? Only because it doesn't. He was every father and brother and uncle and husband, every man who was laying his life down. And you, Mr. Stevens, have some big shoes to fill."

Steve nodded, because it was polite to acknowledge what people told you, but somehow her answer didn't help. He had known, back then, who he was, insomuch as he was a soldier.

Now who was he?

He shook Amy's hand, and politely took his leave.

* * *

Steve wasn't sure where he was going when he left campus. He wanted to go to Brooklyn, wander around looking for his past, but it wasn't there anymore. He wanted to go back to the tower, maybe lie on the couch and eat all of Tony's ice cream, but he wasn't feeling up to other people. So he walked, indiscriminately, wherever his feet took him.

He wasn't sure how long he had been walking, wasn't sure how far he had come, because he mind was too busy turning Amy's words over and over. _Does it matter who he was? Only because it doesn't._

_Only because it doesn't._

He hadn't done it for the glory. That was never the point. But he had thought, it some corner of his mind, that by the time the year 2000 rolled around, he would be very old, with a passel of grandchildren who knew, or were going to know, what their grandpa had done. He thought his legacy would be more tangible, less of something he had to find in children on playgrounds and classes in lecture halls.

When he came back to himself, he was in Harlem, somewhere north of the park, and the building he was standing in front of was the one he was always going to end up at, the one, he realized, he had to go to.

* * *

It was bright and sunny inside, plenty of natural light, but there was nothing they could do to mask the smell of medicines and the elderly. The nurse at the desk signed him in, gave him a sticker that said "VISITOR" in big block letters for him to wear on his shirt.

He walked down the hallway, tiles clicking under his feet, to the room the nurse had told him, where the door was ajar and a woman sat in a bed, quietly sleeping and hooked to all manner of machines.

She was little, the woman inside, and her hair had faded from brown to nearly white. Steve swallowed a lump in his throat before knocking softly. She didn't move, so he stepped into the room, laying a hand on her wrist as he approached the bed.

"Peggy?"

The woman woke with a start at his touch and Steve stared into her brown eyes, the ones he had loved, that were now clouded with cataracts, but there was recognition on her face.

"Steve?"

Her voice was cracked, ragged, and Steve wondered if she had recently had a tube down her throat, helping her eat or - God forbid - breathe.

"Hi, Peggy."

She smiled at him, reaching out a hand, papery skin marked with blue veins and brown freckles, but Steve still thought the hand, the arm, the person was beautiful. It was still Peggy, if she had lived eighty years or eight hundred. Steve swallowed hard.

"I thought you went down over the ocean," she said. "That was twenty years ago, wasn't it?"

Steve gave her hand a squeeze. "I was frozen. The serum kept me alive, they think. And more like seventy."

"What year is it?"

He shouldn't have come here. Tears pricked the corners of his eyes. It wasn't fair, it wasn't okay that he was still the very picture of youth and vitality, while Peggy was in a bed, dying and losing her mind.

"It's 2012," he told her, pulling up a chair to sit.

"Oh," she said. "I must be very old."

"95," he told her. "Not so old. I'm 92."

"Steve, I got married. I thought you were dead, I got married and had a baby."

She had three children, actually, but if her mind was this gone, it wouldn't do to correct her.

"I know," he said, smiling. "And it's what I wanted you to do, you know that. Were you happy?"

She ran her thumb over the back of his hand. "Donald is a good man. He works in advertising, and never made me stay home with the- the baby."

Donald was dead, had been for years, and Peggy had stopped working after her second child was born. Steve knew this from her file, but it still felt good to see her, to hear her say that the times she remembered were the happy ones.

"I'm really glad," he told her.

She stared at him blankly for a moment, before blinking. "You know," she said, kindly, "you look like a boy I knew in the war." 

"Do I?"

"A boy called Steve Rogers. He died."

Steve gave her hand another squeeze. "I am Steve Rogers."

She peered at his face. "I don't think you are," she said. "He would be much older than you."

"Tell me about him," Steve said.

"He was a good boy. Handsome. Smart. Kind. He was perfect for the- well, for what he was for. Can't tell you more, state secrets and all."

Steve nodded. "Did you love him?"

"Oh, sweetie," she reached up to pat his cheek, and he leaned into the caress. "I liked him plenty. But he's been dead for- well, I'm not sure. But he died, and you learn - in wartime, when you're over in the war, you learn that they all die a little. Some of them just die more than others."

"And your boy, Steve?"

"Steve." She smiled and gripped his hand again. "You look so like him. Steve died in a plane crash, but we still saw all these pictures of him. He was- if it weren't for Steve, if his- he had this troop of commandos? They fought for him even after he died. Steve won us the war, sweetie."

A tear trickled down his cheek, but she kept talking.

"I wanted to teach him to dance. But he - he was better than all of us, because he knew what it was to be nothing, and he was never going to let us be nothing, not because of the krauts. He would hate what we all became. Oh, he would be disappointed in me."

"No he wouldn't," Steve said. "Not so long as you were happy and you did your best."

"You're a good boy," she said. "What did you say your name was?"

He couldn't help himself. He held her hand and cried. For her, for Bucky, for his commandos who had died in their war and the next war and at home in their beds. For the world, for the changes, for the losses and the gains. And for himself, for the man he never got to be and for the kid from Brooklyn who just wanted to help.

Peggy might not have known who he was, but she gripped him back, and made soothing noises until he was done.

* * *

Steve took the subway back south, to the tower, and he watched the people around him, the tourists and the freaks and everyone in between, as they went about their days. It was late afternoon, and he was sure there was something he should be doing - an assignment for class, some kind of paperwork that came with being a hero or something - but he sat on the 3 instead, trying not to be a spectacle.

He made a list in his sketchbook - his stupidly expensive sketchbook - of the things he knew  
 _1\. I am a soldier._  
 _2\. It only matters because it doesn't._  
 _3\. Handsome, smart, kind._  
 _4\. They kept fighting for me.  
_ _5._

He left 5 blank, staring at the space, and he sketched, instead of words, the slope of a mountainside, a train running along the side of it, and at the bottom, if you peered closely, you would find a blank space, obscured by shaded fog.

* * *

Steve settled into the rhythm of school, the lectures and critiques and workshops, the business of being there coupled with the business of saving the world, and if he missed a few classes here and there, it was generally forgiven. 

He painted a lot, and sculpted, on his floor of the tower, rather than spending his time in Bruce's labs. The others came by from time to time to talk about art or to see what he was working on. He liked their company when he worked, so long as they were quiet and didn't make fun of his ideas. The first time Tony wandered in to watch him, Steve was annoyed, but Tony actually managed to sit quietly and observe, rather than needing to be the biggest person in the room for once.

Steve was working from a picture that day, trying to translate the shadows from the trees in the courtyard of Peggy's home, where he spent Saturday afternoons when he could, into something that spoke to the legacy of Captain America, and just coming up with drivel and schlock.

Steve knew it was shit, what he was doing, and he felt Tony's eyes boring tiny holes into his shoulder blades, offering judgement he would get from his classmates and didn't need from freaking Iron Man.

"Do you need something?" Steve asked, without turning around.

"You know that painting sucks?"

"Go away, Tony."

Steve went back to trying to make the shadows seem coherent, meaningful. Or, you know, look like shadows. He worked for another five, ten minutes with a hyperawareness of Tony in the room until, around minute nine, Tony made a soft noise, and Steve turned to look at him. "What?"

"I can't cough?"

"Not in my room. What do you want?"

Tony appraised him critically. "You're in a mood today."

"I'm trying to pass painting one and save the world and you're being _distracting_."

Tony, at the very least, had the grace not to ask what painting had to do with saving the world. Instead he cocked his head. "Do you know about Jackson Pollock?"

Steve shrugged. "I've seen his stuff. Looks like a sneeze."

"Have you seen his canvasses, or have you seen prints?"

"Prints, Tony. We're not all megarich."

Tony nodded. "Okay, you need a field trip. Call the gang."

Steve raised an eyebrow and Tony rose to stride to the door. "Where are we going?" Steve asked Tony's retreating form.

"California," he called over his shoulder, and was gone.

* * *

Steve was up in the cockpit with Barton on the trip, because Tony argued that, as the man who designed the Quinjet, he should get to use it to take group field trips, and no one felt like arguing.

"Hey," Steve asked, watching Clint's hands play across the instrument panel as they leveled off.

"Yeah?"

"When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Clint smiled, but didn't look at Steve. "You know how some kids dream of running away from home to join the circus?"

Steve had wanted that for himself, more than a few times. "Yeah."

"I wanted to run away from the circus and have a home."

Steve thought that over for a few minutes. "You didn't want to be Captain America?"

Clint, bless him, barked a laugh. "How old do you think I am? Sorry, Steve, but it was the 80s. You were a memory at best, man. And then really, I guess my parents would have known you? But I didn't."

Steve nodded. Perhaps the orphan who grew up in the circus wasn't the best control group to poll, but neither was the Russian or the son of his creator. Anyway, perhaps it was okay that he was forgotten, at least for a little while. It's not like he had spent that time thinking about the world that was passing him by.

The Quinjet was fast, much faster than was probably sane, and they reached Tony's California home in an hour or so. Tony led the way to the basement which, from the helipad they'd landed on, was a bit more of a trek than it might have been for them to just walk to California. Steve fell into step next to Natasha, and she smiled at him.

"You know why we're here?" he asked.

"Nope. But I love this house. Don't tell Tony."

"I heard it!" Tony called, from the front of the parade. (Sad parade, really, Tony, Clint, Natasha and Steve, but he didn't mind the size of it.)

Natasha said something in Russian, something colorful about Tony's parentage, Steve was sure.

"My mother was a saint!" Tony called back.

Natasha rolled her eyes.

"Are you doing okay?" she asked, her eyes raking Steve's form.

"As well as can be expected."

She smiled sadly. "When they defrosted me, I was alone. A miracle no one killed me before Clint decided not to."

Clint flashed a smile over his shoulder, and Steve couldn't help echoing the easy joy that passed between the assassins.

"So you woke up and there was no one there?"

"There was someone," Natasha shrugged. "But the Russian program was... different from the American one. I killed whoever it was. Didn't even think. I was feral, basically."

"I tamed her!" Clint offered, and Natasha made a derisive noise.

"I let him think that," she pretended to whisper. "I like my marks to be really secure before I hit them."

Steve had never been so glad they had each other. And that he had them. He was about to say so when Stark stopped walking, coming up to a rather grand door.

"Lady and gentlemen," he said, making a grand gesture. "The Stark Collection."

* * *

Why Tony had a veritable museum of modern art in a home he never went to, Steve wasn't sure. Tony said he lent it out to museums that asked, and that this was a very small part of it.

Tony led him to the far side of the gallery, where a single canvas, unframed, stood out against the plain wall.

It was a print Steve had seen before in a book, swirls of color, blacks and whites and orange, yellow and pops of blue.

"It's called _Convergence_ ," Tony told him, but Steve was struck by the reality of the piece, the rawness of the motion. He had seen some expressionist art in his time, and one of the girls in his sculpture class had shown him something by someone called Mark Rothko that looked like paint samples, but this piece was alive. It had energy, and purpose and drive. He could trace every stroke - but not every stroke, because they were covered, hidden by others. And it was beautiful, in person, so much more than it had been on a page.

"What does it mean?" Steve asked.

Tony shrugged. "Whatever you find in it, that's what it means for you."

"I think it means you promised me In-N-Out after this," Clint called from across the room, where he and Natasha were staring at a painting that appeared, to Steve, to be of cans of soup.

Tony smiled. "He's such a prick."

Steve nodded, schooling his hands to stillness. It was wrong to touch paintings, he knew that, but something in this made him want to run his hand along a splotch of ink. He didn't notice when Tony moved away, gone to look at some other priceless treasure he kept locked up, but after some interminable amount of time, Natasha touched his shoulder gently. 

"Steve, Clint is going to eat the Keith Herrings if we keep him much longer. Coming?"

Steve tore his eyes away from the Pollock and smiled. "Yeah. What's In-N-Out?"

By the door, Clint had a minor aneurysm at Steve's oldness, and practically dragged him to the burger joint, jabbering about secret menus.

It was pretty worth it.

* * *

Steve didn't pick up his brush again when they got home, instead turning to the first page of his sketchbook, now smudged from time and use, the mountain and the train he had drawn smearing across the paper.

_1\. I am a soldier._  
 _2\. It only matters because it doesn't._  
 _3\. Handsome, smart, kind.  
_ _4\. They kept fighting for me._

He pressed a pencil to the paper and wrote.

_5\. Whatever you find in it, that's what it means for you.  
6\. The print isn't the original._

He still didn't have answers, but he wasn't sure he still needed them.

Steve read the list one more time before closing the book and holding it reverently in the palms of his hands. The idea that the original was more than the print - that there was truth to be found in the strokes that made up a work, and emotion and movement that wasn't translated when it was flat, that meant something. He thought of Georges Seurat, going blind painting a hat, of Degas and his ballerinas, of the cubist mayhem of Picasso's _Guernica_.

And of Tony, squinting at a weld late into the night, nimble fingers working his machines, or Natasha dancing in the air like a blade, of the calm and still of Bruce and the teeming seas he kept just within his shores.

He wasn't the only one in the tower who was art, wasn't the only one whose prints didn't live up to the original.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Red Tape](https://archiveofourown.org/works/589952) by [echoinautumn (maybetwice)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn)




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